Fat Tuesday: Caloric restriction’s days are numbered

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” – Mark Train

Twain may have been correct about health, but longevity may be another matter altogether. Eat, drink, and be merry… if you want to die: that is what the evidence has shown for the last 75 years, right? In a way, perhaps it was too good to be true: go on a diet and live happily ever after… forever. Well, not forever, but, yes, for significantly longer. It still seems to be a robust finding in mice and rats, where lifetimes are short and easily measured in the lifetime of a single grant funding cycle. But a new careful, well-controlled, and decade-spanning study from a group at the National Institute on Aging has shown that, whereas monkeys that are put on a restricted diet long-term may be healthier than monkeys that are fed 50% more, they don’t live longer. But you have to admit that they during monkeys do look spritely.